Original characters with style and humor, combined with fantastic art direction. If the gameplay is half as fun as watching the preview videos is, then VALVe has another hit on their hands.

This is the latest in a plethora of new titles clearly focusing on raising the bar in regards to character and story. Make every game epic, seems to be the rule of thumb. Get the player feel like they’re participating in something monumentally huge. Huge in ever so many different ways..

Huge creatures.. (Shadow of the Colossus, Metroid Prime 3, God of War, various MMOG high-tier quest NPCs).. There’s nothing more epic feeling, or making you feel like more of a hero than when you’re playing an itty-bitty sized character and your objective is to defeat the monster-equivalent of the Empire State Building in terms of scale!

Huge environments.. (Heavenly Sword, again various MMOGs, Vanguard would be a good example with its far viewing plane of actual explorable areas) Pretty self-explanatory.. sheer scope of the world in which you are fighting. More importantly this ties into the next note of HUGE….

Huge IMPACT.. (Heavenly Sword) Everyone wants to change the world. In a game, being able to have a perceptible impact upon the world or it’s inhabitants is a big deal. While I’ll admit that I have yet to play the full game of Heavenly Sword to know how this continues, but in the demo on PSN there’s a point where the main character is running down gigantic pillars of awesome as they slowly fall to the earth below.. in an area where you can clearly SEE that the earth is so very FAR below.. While this is not an example of the PLAYER impacting the world, it shows other inhabitants impacting the world in great ways trying to kill the main character, which certainly has it’s uses.

It’s a very exciting point in the history of games right now! With technology allowing for scope and scale to become dramatically higher than ever before, and new interfaces like the Wii-mote and Six-axis controller, I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next few years will bring.

.. and food for thought, how could some of these new capabilities be applyed to the MMOG? =)